If I’m honest, we didn’t spend as much time in the barracks as I thought we would. Despite having the four of us left in Unit 6 home again, we spent a lot of time apart—or, at least, at the bar in the basement. I picked up where I’d left off with mixing drinks after Cygnus ran off Braille labels for everything, and while it was slower going than it used to be, it was still more or less functional.

I’d taken to going down to the bar at night, just for an hour or two before I went to sleep. There wasn’t any regular maintenance required down there, but I’d just stand around washing the glasses and arranging the bottles in the fridge and such just to have something to do. On the first night, it was nothing more than an excuse to be alone for a little while and decompress, but on the second Cygnus came down too after a while and I ended up actually pouring drinks.

People rolled through one at a time—the second night it was Cygnus, on the third it was Loybol, the fourth, Bell, and on the fifth it was her—finally, after all that time.

Ava stumbled down the concrete steps heavily pre-gamed and made her way to the little bastion of light in the basement the bar stood in.

I’d known this was coming. I do have at least a bit of pattern-recognition skills, anyway, and I was certain enough that this was about to happen that I’d gotten dressed for the occasion, wearing the little suit-vest I used to wear while dealing. Leaning into the irony of it all was what I did best, and I figured if tonight was going to be the night Ava chose to make her big stand against me, the least I could do was look the part.

I was also moderately tipsy already. I think I spent every single night drunk.

In hindsight, I was lucky we were back on the front lines not too long after that night.

Benji came to me in much the same way, I remembered—almost a year ago. More than that, even. It was so long ago at that point that it didn’t even feel like something that happened to me. Maybe to a close friend, but the event didn’t encircle my heart like it used to.

Too far gone, now. Too much between me and it—and either way, Benji was dead, so there wasn’t much point in reliving it.

That said—

Ava came up to me, took a seat on the center stool, and just sat there staring at the bar’s back wall for a moment, completely expressionless.

I gave her more than enough time to take the initiative, but she never did, so I picked up the slack. “Will you be having anything, miss?” I asked.

Waitressing—or real-life bartending—sounded like true nightmare jobs, but I didn’t mind playing the part on TV every once in a while.

The question barely processed. After a moment she lowered her eyes and giggled a bit. “I don’t even know why I’m here,” she said, voice dry. She’d been drinking, sure, and she hadn’t been taking water with it. “I’m already drunk. I don’t need your help.”

I shrugged. “You’re more than welcome to just sit there, then,” I said. “I’m not going to stop you.”

With that, I turned my attention back to a glass that was already spotless, swirling some water around in it just to do something with my hands.

Ava watched me do it for a moment. Exactly enough time passed to make me half-forget she was there.

“Words cannot begin to describe…” she started, just as toneless as before, just as slow—with that same dopey half-smile she’d flashed while giggling a second before. “Can’t even start to describe how much I hate you.”

“I know,” was all I said in response. No pause in my cleaning. I didn’t even look at her.

That, of course, is why I pre-gamed for this, too.

“Get me a beer,” she said.

I turned and opened the mini-fridge back there and pulled one out—then, after a moment’s thought, grabbed a second one. The first I put down on top of the fridge, and the second I held in my hand, forming an ice-ring to pop the bottle cap off. Brought it to my lips and took a long, hard chug.

Yoru’d taught me that one, sometime last year.

Ava watched me do it for the few seconds it lasted, and then when I was done I took the unopened bottle and passed it to her, popping the cap off with the same ice-ring I used for my own.

I’d only managed to chug about half of mine, but that alone was enough to press Ava’s buttons. “God. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“Depends who you ask,” I replied, swirling my half-filled bottle around. “And your perspective.”

I expected her to have an instant retort, but she didn’t. Instead, she took a normal-sized sip from her bottle and swallowed it down hard, like it physically hurt her to do so.

“I tried to like you,” she said, after a moment. “I really did.”

“I don’t believe you,” I replied, instantly.

“That’s okay. I don’t care what you think.”

“Maybe you should.” The words left my mouth before I could stop them, and it was only in the blank second where they scattered to the air between us that I realized what that could be interpreted as.

It was not lost on Ava. I didn’t even have time to pray that it would be. “Are you threatening me, Erika?”

That chug, though, put me over the edge. I was far too drunk to be as afraid of what was coming out of my mouth as I should have been. The words just came, fast and even, and the rock-brain corner of my skull that lived in eternal fear of these things was powerless to stop me.

What the hell did I care what Ava thought of me?

“Does it matter?” I asked her. I didn’t even bother to face her as I spoke. Reaching for a dry glass in the sink and scanning the hanging ones for an open spot. “I wouldn’t threaten you if I wanted you gone. It would just...happen.”

Ava didn’t have much of a reply to that. At least not for a couple moments. When she did, she started assertively, but tapered off into tittering. “You’re right,” she said, “and that’s what pisses me off so much. Well, one of the things. There’s a lot. You know.”

“I don’t. Explain it to me.”

I’d picked my mode. Backing off now was weakness, and Ava was not someone I could show weakness in front of.

That was simply how it was.

She sighed and tipped her head further downward. I may have been armed to the gills with alcohol and animosity, but she wasn’t. She’d fired her shot and that, as it turned out, was it.

“You let him die,” she said, in a tone I’d never heard her use before. A quiet one, a low one, without a single ounce of threatening air in it. Any bravado she’d come in with, fueled by her own drinking, was gone. Maybe she’d thought she was ready for this, but she wasn’t. “What else do you want me to say? You let him die, Erika. You walked away.”

I didn’t have a response for that. The question was purely rhetorical. It didn’t need one.

I expected her to follow it up with something, but she didn’t. She sat there and waited for me.

I’d already chosen violence—it was far too late to choose anything else. I’d dug in too deep. This could be an act to trip me up, I knew—I wouldn’t put it past her. She’d do something like that to someone she hated so viscerally.

She sat and waited for me to speak until she couldn’t handle it anymore. “I want you dead,” she said, and a hint of a growl crept back into her voice. “I want you in a fucking cage. You shouldn’t exist. It spits on everything we’ve done to harbor you. To—to enable you. And you’re the only person in this war that matters. All the rest of us—we’re expendable, we’re dirt, we’re nothing. God, Erika—they had you and Bell in a room with your guards down and they took a potshot at Bell. Do you realize how fucking insane that is?”

“I was there,” I said, flatly. “I remember.”

“Yeah, sure, you remember, but do you understand? That’s always the question, isn’t it? What actually gets through your skull that you don’t want to get through?”

“Lots of things. You wouldn’t get it.”

That, really, was true—both halves of it.

“No, you don’t get it,” she went on. The fire returned. Arms clenched, the moisture in the corners of her eyes glistening red. She was once again present and I swallowed and remembered the path I’d taken. “Bell is literally fucking invincible. Trying to kill her is a complete, abject waste of time. Do you really think they’re stupid enough to believe a bullet to the head would kill her? No, they can’t be that dumb. That fire-key from Buffalo had the right idea, last year, and it still wasn’t good enough. She was a charred hairless bone with barely a raw heartbeat and she still regenerated back to normal in under a week. How is anyone ever supposed to beat that? They had you dead to rights, Erika. They could’ve ended the war on the spot. They could have stopped everything right then and there by putting a hunk of steel between your eyes and they chose not to. Because they want you alive, and the rest of us are worthless. Do you realize how we see that? The rest of us who know you, who’ve seen how little of a fuck you give about everyone else, who watch you crumble when something goes wrong, who watch you freeze up when someone asks you a weird question, who’re fully aware you’d eat shit to even a middling telepath?”

Ava’s breath came in ragged half-gasps. There was no window to retort. Nothing I could say to defend myself.

I locked up just like she said I would.

And still she went on: “The word from above is that we’re supposed to give our lives to protect you, because the war can’t be lost if you’re here, and can’t be won if you’re not. The narrative for you might be that you’re supposed to die for the land, or the Radiant or the cause or Prochazka or whatever-the-fuck, who fucking cares, but to the rest of us rabble the narrative is that we’re supposed to die for you!”

She stuck a finger at me, a shaking hard-extended finger attached to a stone arm braced on the table by her elbow, her face contorted and twisted into something inhuman—no, not inhuman: something explicitly human. A rage an animal can’t share—a rage from knowing.

A rage from understanding.

Her arms twisted upward and caught her head. Her voice dropped lower but the force—the hell in there—did not falter. “I don’t have anything to live for. You know that, right? Yoru and I had each other and that was it. We never gave a shit about the fucking land, or the future, or the land’s future or the war or the cause or whatever this is. We gave a shit about the fat paycheck and each other. You’d be having this same conversation with Yoru if I was in his place, so don’t think this is just an unfortunate turn of events where he died before I did. We were always on the same page about this. We were in lock-fucking-step. He was just more willing to lie to your face than I am.”

I reached backward for my half a beer without looking away from her and she snapped. “Don’t you fucking ignore me!”

My arm dropped to its side and I became still.

“You think you can drink this shit away? You think the world stops spinning when you stop paying attention? Jesus Christ.” Her voice dropped low again. “I want you dead. I want to strangle you with my own two fucking hands, but I can’t. And it’s not because I’m not allowed. Don’t think for a second it’s because Prochakza would kill me right after. It’s because I know I can’t do it. I know I can’t ever beat you in a head-to-head fight, because I’m made of flesh and that means I get dehydrated and I choke to death the second I raise a finger. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you go all out because I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in real danger. Bell told me how you killed the shooter out at Sal’s place and you did that with a fresh concussion. I’m probably the weakest key in the building now. Yoru and I were always the bottom two, I guess with Cygnus we’d be the bottom three in some order. I wouldn’t stand a chance against you. None of us would. And I want you to know how much that hurts. How much like shit that makes me feel. How weak and powerless and useless I am against the shit we have to do here. I want all of that to bounce around your empty fucking skull in the half-second you get before the New York gang’s bullet passes between your eyes.”

She stood up. Shoved the barstool in. Turned around.

“And even that probably wouldn’t be enough for me,” she said, more quietly, “if it means it’s not my finger on the trigger.”

And then she left and I was alone again in that cone of light I remembered so well.